In general, you usually don't need a linked list in Perl, since with regular arrays, you can push and pop or shift and unshift at either end, or you can use splice to add and/or remove arbitrary number of elements at arbitrary points. Both pop and shift are both O(1) operations on perl's dynamic arrays. In the absence of shifts and pops, push in general needs to reallocate on the order every log(N) times, and unshift will need to copy pointers each time.